Archive for ‘international’

Recently there has been lots of noise around the arrest of three members of Pussy Riot, a Russian anarchist female punk band. The media almost unequivocally represented them as the modern heroines of our time, fighting for freedom, democracy, sexual liberation and peace against a dark and ruthless dictatorship (articles are to be found in the NYT, Le Monde. The Guardian, etc.) Feminist groups all over the Western world are sending links and petitions to “free pussy riot”, and demonstrations have even been organised in support of the group by big institutionalised organisations such as “Osez le féminisme” (dare to be a feminist).

Now while I support without ambiguity the liberation of Pussy Riot’s members, it’s worth pausing for a minute to ask ourselves, as radical feminists, what the political dynamics are here. Why would Western media denounce so passionately the repression of feminists in Russia, when it usually only diffuses information that supports male supremacy and patriarchy? Feminism has long disappeared from any malestream media, except when journalists can turn it into male masturbation material, that is pornify either our suffering or our resistance to it. What’s going on here?

This week, thanks to our readers, writers and our wonderful guest-bloggers, the HUB has reached the milestone of 500,000 pageviews. While this is a very tiny number compared to the amount of traffic any number of mainstream blogs attract in a month, a week, or even a single day, considering that one-million pageviews is a milestone that most blogs never reach, and considering how marginalized radical feminism is, this number is significant and encouraging.

So what has brought HUB to this place, since its beginnings on May 18, 2011? Read on to see significant events in our herstory, including links to our top posts, an opportunity to revisit our wonderful guest posts, and more.

A little over a year ago in May, 2011, Ms. Julie Bindel wrote a fabulous piece here at the Hub titled, “What About The Men?” The piece was radical and amazing. Late last night, I ran across this post over at Gender Trender. It’s an interview of Juile Bindel by male “transgender” Paris Lees conducted earlier this year. Apparently, in the year since she first wrote for the Hub, Ms. Bindel has done an about-face on the issue of “What about the men?”.

I can only wonder, what happened between now and then? Are aliens abducting radical feminists and replacing them with pod people?!

Back then, Julie Bindel was defending women-only space and saying how not enough has changed to invite men to the party. Some excerpts from Julie Bindel’s post at the Hub:

As is often the case with misogynists and anti-feminists, the trans horde that took advantage of the “inclusivity” (read: a transwoman helped organize the march, and woe be unto anyone who crosses men who demand access to woman-only space in general) of NYC Dyke March — and others who weren’t even there — don’t seem to have read a word of anything Sheila Jeffreys has actually written. If they had read her, how could it have rationally been said that Jeffreys — a pro-female, pro-lesbian writer — and her work had no place at a lesbian-centered event?

Or, perhaps they read a couple of words, saw something they didn’t like, and threw away the rest? “The rest” being Sheila Jeffreys’s entire life’s work of pro-female, pro-lesbian, PIV-critical radical feminist analysis which spans decades and examines women’s lives from pre-WWI — a body of work from which modern women can draw many parallels, recognize obvious patterns in how women are oppressed by men over time, and call age-old bullshit when we see it, because we are never, ever allowed to see it. Women’s history is routinely erased, and this is a deliberate political strategy to keep women as ignorant of patriarchal context and as oppressed — and as complicit in our own oppression — as possible.

Recently, male-to-female transgender Joelle Ruby Ryan pointed out how well organized, well-supported and well-attended the 11th annual Philadelphia Trans-Health Conference (PTHC) was expected to be, and contrasted that to the relatively tiny and unsupported Radfem 2012 conference which has had to relocate after trans* activists successfully lobbied for its booking to be canceled by London’s Conway Hall.

Today, Malawian women protested after several women were brutally beaten and stripped naked by male street vendors for the offense of not-wearing-dresses in public.

Street vendors accused women of defying cultural norms and attacked them this week in Lilongwe and Blantyre, two of the nation’s largest cosmopolitan centers.

“They beat them up and stripped them naked, claiming they did not follow the tradition,” said Seodi White, a rights activist and protest organizer. “Attacking women in trousers is an outrage. We are a democracy, they’re taking us back to the dark ages.”

Protesters wore pants, miniskirts and leggings in a show of solidarity as they gathered to condemn the attacks.

While this protest may (or may not) evoke familiar imagery from last summer’s “SlutWalk” protests, unlike SlutWalk, this protest sticks to the issues, and makes it clear what they are getting at. Importantly, these women actually name the agent of harm: men, attacking women, out of contempt for women.

I’ve decided to kick start the New Year with a three-part review of the mother of all radical feminist works : Sexual Politics by Kate Millet.

When I first read this book I knew I had found the work of a true intellectual; no pretensions, just genius. The majority of the non-feminist Great Works of political or literary theory I’d read up until then were suddenly revealed as fakes. Later, I would enjoy the work of other radical women, but most of them acknowledge Sexual Politics as being influential, if not foundational, to their own writing.

One thing that distinguishes human animals from non-human animals is death rituals and ceremonies. One thing that made me a feminist, was the complete lack of human respect for women’s systematic ritualised rapes/deaths. In the early 1980s, I went to one of the ‘Women Against Rape in War’ remembrance walks on Australia’s nationalistic war day – ANZAC Day (April 25th). I was young, I had no idea the scale of the hatred and violence which would be directed at the women who marched way-back at the rear of the formal military parade, to just lay a wreath on the war memorial cenotaphs, in memory of our own war dead and injured.